Future Fossils #0041 – Hannah Yata (Art, Wilderness, Rebellion)

This week’s guest is the visionary painter Hannah Faith Yata, whose riotous, ecstatic work explores and celebrates natural biodiversity, and exalts the repressed feminine – the beautiful and the grotesque, death and life in vivid color all at once.

We talk about her new show “Dancing in Delirium,” the role and life of wilderness in the Anthropocene – weather control and fear porn (eerily prescient, given recent events; this talk was recorded in July) – the feeling of living through a time of massive change and chaos (and clocking out with cute pet videos) – art as rebellion and the party as a revolution – the pagan conjunction of human and animal revived in cosplay and furry culture – and the ways our ideas are literally making impressions on the land )yet, we are something that the land itself is doing)…

“The city, to me – that’s like a virtual reality made out of brick and steel.”

“Wildness for me, means: leave it the fuck alone.”

“I like to think of my work as this strange awakening of a rebellion…”

“I’m not fond of human faces, and I’ll tell you why. For me, seeing somebody’s face and having to analyze every single detail, every wrinkle, every little nuance, is just…if you think about painting and its historical significance, it’s like you’re immortalizing this person. You’re immortalizing their ego. To me, though, I think it’s all about more or less the abolishment of the ego and this realizing that we’re a part of nature, that we see ourselves in nature…I don’t want to shit on portraiture, because I think it’s beautiful, but that’s not my statement.”

“I feel like everything today is this dance of trying to keep the ego so that it doesn’t fly off into space.”

“It doesn’t have to be pretty…if you or I were thrown out in the wilderness tomorrow, it’s not like there’s some nature god that’s going to protect us. It’s wild out there! Actual wildness is wild!”

“We have more moral codes when we go to war against other people than we do hacking through a rainforest. So to personify things and to think of them as these living personalities helps us to remember our respect for these things.”